forum got SLOW today... any ideas?

[CanCanCase]

www.CanCanCase.com
It's small, never had page load problems before. Today, pages involving php or sql queries are taking several minutes to load, if they even load at all.

I don't know if vBSEO is at fault (I doubt it) but can anyone even take a wild stab at speculation as to why things suddenly slowed down? I don't know of any changes that were made in the past week to have caused such problems.

TIA...
-Case

[Original Bacon]

Not really unless you had a lot of activity on your site.

[briansol]

contact your host... something is wrong

[CanCanCase]

Originally Posted by Original Bacon

Not really unless you had a lot of activity on your site.

By our standards, there has been a "lot" of activity, but I don't think 6 new users and 150-200 posts is "a lot" enough to break things...

Originally Posted by briansol

contact your host... something is wrong

That's really my problem... I'm my own host, and I'm now getting the feeling I'm in WAY over my head...

This probably isn't the right place to solicit help moving my board and/or recommendations for a good host that can manage the server side of things for me, is it?

-Case

[briansol]

are you running your website from your house?

[CanCanCase]

Yes... It's amazing what a good looking GUI can do for the un-informed! Apple's server package makes everything look just easy enough that someone with 15 year old Unix experience can get in over their head very quickly!

The vBulletin.com folks seem to think vB itself will run okay on my setup at home, but once I added vBSEO they're all pointing to that as the main culprit. I'm looking to move to a managed hosting solution now, but the amount of differing opinion about what's needed is staggering. I would love to throw this thing up on a dedicated server someplace, but don't want to go to that expense for such a small board. Everyone has their favorite $5.95 shared hosting company, but any discussion of such seems to always degenerate into 3 guys with a sob story and 3 more with shiny gold stars to offer for the same company.

Is there such a thing as a professional forum installer/hacker/admin/seo-er slash server admin that works as needed a few hours per week or month? I'm a big fan of "if it aint broke, don't fix it" but I want someone that knows what they're doing to pay attention if something DOES break...

Does anyone have any good data on the sort of server load and resource utilization vBSEO will add to a small vB? All of the hosting packages I'm finding all talk in terms of HDD space and bandwidth. Then they've got clauses in the ToS about not bursting memory usage, inhibiting other clients' resources, or attaining a momentary level of CPU load...

Oh, since this isn't exactly a "troubleshooting issue" anymore, does it really belong here?

-Case

[briansol]

Oh, you're running mac servers? that's why. lol j/k

I don't care if you have a tier-1 rack of hardware... unless you have a dedicated oc12 line to your house, your site will be slow once people start using it. you can't serve a product site on dsl or cable, or even fios to the public reliably. Even with a static ip range, once you get some traffic, internet designed for 1 person (you at your home) and designed for download speed, not upload speed (web serving is nearly all upload) you're bottle necked with 3-5 concurrent users. anything after that is just dreadful waiting of packets.

vB will ALWAYS point to vbseo because they don't want to deal with anything. hate them. lol as a simple fix, rename the htaccess file to htaccess.txt and turn off the plugin in the plugin manager. if its still slow, its not vbseo.

Now, if the site is slow for YOU when you hit it locally (ie, you got to Test Page for the SSL/TLS-aware Apache Installation on Web Site or whatever mac's do for that...) and it's slow, then its a server issue.

[CanCanCase]

Thanks for your detailed comments. That's nearly word for word what I just got done discussing with an actual IT support friend of mine.

Turns out, it wasn't vBSEO, vB, the cable modem, or anything else... server config issues had my ftp daemon going zonkers (Apple's xftpd sucks to begin with) and it was chewing up 99.9% of my cpu time.

As has been pointed out several times now, the home/cable modem solution will quickly bottleneck things. For now, I'm content with the performance from the outside world... I do know that the day is coming when I'll have more than our record of 9 concurrent users, however. Hopefully by the time vBSEO does its job of helping promote the site, I'll have enough users and enough ad revenue coming in to justify either a bigger 'net connection or just move things to a dedicated server that's got a bigger 'net connection.

Thanks for everyone's help (on 4 different forums now!) talking this out with me...

-Case

[briansol]

you don't need to make the jump to a fully dedicated machine off the bat.

There's shared options (the typical 7-15 bucks a month) that generally suck...
then there's VPS (virtual private) which is basically a shared dedicated, but you each have a virtual machine with X dedicated resources. You can get one of these from 40-150 a month